Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Features

Information in an enterprise can be spread across Web pages, databases, mail servers or other collaboration software, document repositories, file servers, and desktops. Oracle SES searches all your data through the same interface. Oracle SES is fully globalized and works with many languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Hebrew.

This section introduces a few of the features in Oracle SES. It includes the following topics:

Secure Search

Much of the information within an organization is publicly accessible. Anyone is allowed to view it. Therefore, it is relatively easy for a crawler to find and index that information.

However, there are other sources that are protected. These protected sources might be viewable only by certain users or groups of users. For example, while users can search in their own e-mail folders, they should not be able to search anyone else's e-mail.

For protected sources, the Oracle SES crawler indexes any document with the proper access control list. When end users perform a search, only documents that they have privileges to view are returned.

Federated Search

Oracle SES can search multiple Oracle SES instances with their own document repositories and indexes. It provides a unified framework to search the different repositories that are crawled, indexed, and maintained separately.

Federated search allows a single query to run across all Oracle SES instances. It aggregates the search results to show one unified result list to the user. User credentials are passed along with the query so that each federation endpoint can authenticate the user against its own document repository.

Figure 1-4 illustrates the federation architecture and two options for an end user to connect through a browser to Oracle SES. Option 1 allows users to connect their browsers directly to Oracle SES using the end-user graphical interface. Option 2 retrieves results from Oracle SES through Web Services after arbitrary post-processing, such as changing the look-and-feel or embedding the results in a page. For this option, the browser connects to remote applications, which connect to the Web Services API.